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Of Domains and Duhmains

So. This is the story of trying to register dotblag.com.

I’ve used joker.com as my primary registrar for some years now. They’ve been reliable and responsive in the past when I’ve needed manual intervention/help. However. Their CC validation system lately has been, to say the least, persnickety. Wonk. Very wonk. To the point that I have to take my business elsewhere. While processing the registration for dotblag.com, the .com registration was denied but the .net went through. Why? CC DENIED. “Oh duplicate charge suppression” I hear the audience say. NAY. The .com order went in first.

I tried a couple days later, same problem. Meanwhile I also have domains needing renewal, some of those process ok but I’m still unable to register this domain.

Finally. I gave up. And went to the dark side. No. I won’t even tell you. You can look at the whois data yourself. I’m NOT happy about it because they’re shitty, their website is utter and complete and total trash, impossible to navigate, and has the worst error messages I’ve ever seen, or rather not. Usually something goes wrong they just say “Error occured” or something just as nonsensical in red text at the bottom, but never tell you what or why.

A customer of ours had an experience with them recently. Sent us a screenshot. I couldn’t believe that there wasn’t any real error message. Just something along the lines of “error with nameserver.” I was able to reproduce the same error message, but I had/have no idea if it’s the same error since the error message doesn’t indicate the error. I suspected (and this is how I tested) that the customer tried to register a nameserver inside the zone in question without any associated glue, and therefore got this error. I’m still not sure how/where to create glue records in their crappy (did I mention their UI is terrible) interface.

I’ll go into more detail sometime about the registration process I experienced while registering this domain.

Remind me to follow up on that RAID card one too, I’ve got the rest of the story on that now. Though that book isn’t quite closed.